Friday, July 19, 2013

So you think Ray Kelly should head up the Department of Homeland Security?

Well, whether you do or don't, you should read Conor Friedersdorf's excellent piece at The Atlantic, "Prominent Democrats Are Now Comfortable With Racial and Ethnic Profiling," which includes:

Under Ray Kelly, the NYPD
infiltrated Muslim communities and spied on hundreds or perhaps
thousands of totally innocent Americans at mosques, colleges, and
elsewhere. Officers "put American citizens under
surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not
because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity," AP reported, citing NYPD documents. Informants were paid to bait Muslims into making inflammatory statements. The NYPD even conducted surveillance on Muslim Americans outside its jurisdiction, drawing a rebuke from an FBI field office, where a top official charged that "the department's surveillance of Muslims in the state has hindered
investigations and created 'additional risks' in counterterrorism."

Moreover, "In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods,
eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques," the Associated Press reported, "the New York
Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or
triggered a terrorism investigation." The horrifying effects on innocent Americans are documented here. But despite the high costs and lack of counterterrorism benefits, Kelly stands behind the surveillance on Muslims.

*****

On its own, Kelly's treatment of Muslims ought to disqualify him from
the position, and even from being praised by the president of the United
States. On its own, his treatment of blacks and Hispanics ought to
disqualify him from being promoted, too. But his tenure has also been
characterized by a dearth of transparency that has exacerbated his
abuses. As Murray Weiss explains, "The lack of transparency during the Kelly
administration played a pivotal role in keeping the public -- and by
extension the NYPD -- from recognizing years earlier that the number of
stop-and-frisks in New York was escalating to troubling levels. Kelly failed to disclose the stop-and-frisk
numbers for seven years despite being required by law to do so. When he
was finally forced to release them, the numbers were stunning, and
caused critics to ask why stop-and-frisks escalated from 100,000 during Bloomberg's first year in office to 500,000 seven years later."

Yet New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer is lobbying for him, and on Wednesday President Obama said Kelly's "obviously done an extraordinary job" and would be "very well qualified for the job" of Homeland Security secretary.

Sadly, this isn't at all surprising, though it is to the immense discredit of both men.